The Eleventh

Theo had the box on his knees.

He had had it on his knees since the side door of the palace, where Dame M had brought it out of the cold room herself and put it into his arms, flat, and said, “Knees together, Mr Hartigan, and both hands, and you will not let go of it until you are at the chain,” and Theo had said, “Yes, Dame Margaret,” in a voice Frederick had never heard him use, and got into the back of the car with it as though it were made of glass. It was the pizza-oven box, with the printing on the side. Nobody had thought to find a better one, or everybody had thought of it and decided not to.

Castellanos drove. It was not the usual car. It was the big dark one with the small flag on the wing that his father had used on his visits, with a second officer in the front and cars before and behind, and it went down the Charter Axis at a slow, even speed between people standing on both pavements in their coats, with poppies on, not waving, only watching it go by.

Theo was quiet for a while.

“Freddie.”

“What?”

“I’m going to look at the back of your head,” said Theo. “Like Lukas said. The whole time. Up to the chain. And then I’m going to look at the back of the sentry’s head, when it’s mine, because there won’t be anybody else’s.” He swallowed. “And I’m not going to lock my knees. Mum said. She said she’s seen three people faint on parade in her life and all three had locked their knees and one of them was a bishop.”

“You won’t faint.”

“I might.” Theo looked at the box. “If I faint, don’t pick it up. Let somebody else. You’ve got your own.”

“I won’t pick it up.”

“Promise.”

“I promise,” said Frederick, and Theo nodded, and looked out of the window again, and held the box with both hands, and did not let go of it all the way across the river.

---

He was wearing the big coat.

It was dark grey, long, heavier than anything he had ever worn, with a high collar, and Dame M had had it pressed and a poppy put in the left lapel, a paper one from the Legion’s tray, the same as everybody’s, because she said that was what his father had always worn on the Eleventh, the same poppy as everybody’s, from the tray, a dollar. Under it he wore a black tie of his father’s that his mother had tied for him in the hall, twice, because the first time it was crooked. He was not wearing a uniform. He was Colonel-in-Chief of the Regiment of Virginia and had been since his birthday in May, and the Household had asked whether he would like to wear the regiment’s dress, and he had said no, because he was fifteen and had never been a soldier and did not want to look like one on the day for the dead, and Dame M had said, That is what your grandfather said, sir, in 1958, about the Navy, and gone away, and not asked again.

It was cold on the crest. His father had been right.

---

The cars stopped at the gate.

From the gate it was a walk, up the path between the graves, the long white rows going away on both sides over the slope in the grey light, all exactly the same size. The Regiment of Virginia lined the path, a pace apart, all the way up, in the red coats and the dark blue spiked helmets, with their rifles reversed and their heads bowed, and none of them looked at him as he went by, and he understood that it was the same thing as the ceiling, and that there were several hundred of them, and that every one of them had decided it.

Theo walked two paces behind him and one to the left, with the box. Frederick could hear his feet on the path, a little out of step and then in step and then out again. His mother walked ahead, with her officer. He did not look back.

At the top of the path the crest opened out.

He had been here every Eleventh since he was twelve, and in 2021 when he was eight, and had always come in by the side, through the trees. He had never seen it from the path. The amphitheatre was ahead of him, white and plain, its seats full of people in dark coats, and on the grass around it and down the slope on every side there were people standing, more than the forecourt, quiet, with their breath going up white, and in the middle of all of it, on its few steps, the Tomb.

He had forgotten how small it was.

It was a white box. That was all it was. A plain white marble box, the shape of a headstone made larger, with nothing on it but three lines of lettering, on a little square of paving at the top of a few steps, with a chain in front of it at twenty paces and a black rubber mat between the chain and the steps, and a sentry on the mat. The sentry was walking. Twenty-one paces. A turn. Twenty-one seconds facing the Tomb. Twenty-one paces back. He did it now, in front of three thousand people and the King, exactly as he would do it at three in the morning in front of nobody.

They sat him in the front row of the amphitheatre, on the aisle, with his mother beside him, and he sat down, and looked along the row, to see where Theo had gone with the box, and stopped.

The two seats between his mother and Theo were taken.

In the first of them sat a boy in a plain black overcoat with nothing on it at all, no star, no ribbon, no order, only a paper poppy from the Legion’s tray in the lapel, the same as everybody’s, a dollar. He was fair, and very upright, and a little shorter than Frederick, and he was sitting with his gloved hands on his knees and looking straight ahead at the Tomb with an expression of complete composure, the expression of a boy standing very carefully inside a shape somebody had drawn for him, and Frederick had last seen it across a room at a wedding two summers ago, and had read it, since, in a letter, in the bath, three times.

In the second seat, between him and Theo, sat a dark, thin boy of the same age with his hands in his lap, who was looking not at the Tomb but at the back of the fair boy’s head.

The fair boy turned his head, very slightly, and looked along the row at him.

“Frederick,” he said.

“Alexander,” said Frederick.

Neither of them laughed. It was the nearest thing to laughing that either of them could do on the crest on the Eleventh, and they both knew it, and Alexander’s mouth moved at one corner, the way the Duke’s did now, and was still.

“I’m not here,” said Alexander, quietly, in English, the careful English of the letter, looking at the Tomb again. “Or rather, I am here, and he isn’t. The German Emperor sent his wreath to Government House yesterday, as your rule says, and he is in Potsdam with a cold. I am a member of the House of Hanover, attending the Eleventh at the invitation of the Regent, with my mother’s leave and my sister’s signature.” He paused. “Charlotte signed it twice. Once as my sister and once as my Regent. She said that was the only way she would be sure which of them had let me go.”

Frederick looked at his mother.

His mother was looking at the Tomb.

“Your aunt Caroline telephoned on Wednesday,” said his mother, without turning her head. “Your cousin had asked whether he might come. As family. Not as anything else. I said that family stands where it likes on the Eleventh, and sits in the front row.” She folded her gloved hands in her lap. “I didn’t tell you.”

“No.”

“If I had told you on Wednesday you would have spent three days deciding what to feel about it,” said his mother. “This way you only have to feel it.” And she went on looking at the Tomb.

At the end of the row, beyond the dark boy, Theo had the box on his knees again, and was sitting very straight, and was looking sideways at the dark boy with an expression Frederick had never seen on him before, of a person meeting a colleague.

The dark boy did not look round. He said, very low, to the Tomb, in an accent that was not Alexander’s, rougher, from somewhere further east:

“The back of the head.”

“The knees,” said Theo, to the box.

“Lukas,” said Alexander, without moving, by way of introduction.

“Theo,” said Frederick.

“We know,” said Lukas Brandt, and folded his hands, and looked at the back of the Emperor’s head, and that was all anybody said in the front row until the Book came.

He looked at the lid.

From the front row you could see it, just: running across the white lid from one side to the other, thin and grey, the crack. He looked at it, and found that it was the right thing to look at, and kept looking.

---

The Book came up the path at a quarter to eleven.

It was carried by two men of the Legion, old men, in berets, one at each side of it, on a sort of board, and it was very large, larger than any book he had ever seen, bound in dark red, as thick as a step. They carried it up the path between the red coats and across the plaza and up the few steps, very slowly, and laid it on the lid of the Tomb, and opened it, at a page near the end, where the most recent names were, and stepped back. The wind turned a page, and one of them stepped forward and turned it back and put his hand flat on it for a moment and stepped back again.

Then the service.

It was the order of 1921, unchanged. A priest of the Church of America read it from the side of the plaza, in a plain voice that the wind took and gave back, and there were four hymns. Frederick knew them all and did not sing them. He did not know whether he was supposed to, and found when the first began that his mouth would not, so he stood with the hymn sheet in his gloved hands and listened to three thousand people sing round him in the cold, ragged and a little behind the band. Beside him his mother sang, very quietly. Beyond her Alexander did not sing, and held the hymn sheet in both hands, underneath, by the edge, with two fingers. At the end of the row Theo sang, badly, loudly, with the box held against his chest with one arm, because he had been told to hold it with both hands and had decided that singing mattered more.

The third was I Vow to Thee, My Country.

It had come into the order in 1921 with the rest of it, to the tune an Englishman had made out of a piece of a symphony that same year, and it was the one hymn of the four that everybody on the crest knew without the sheet, the one every child in the Realm learned at school before they could read the sheet. The band played the first line through once, alone, and the crest came in on the second time, all of it, the seats and the grass and the people among the graves, and it was not ragged this time. It went up from three thousand people at once like something lifted.

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above, Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love.

His mother sang it. Theo, at the end of the row, sang it at the top of his voice with the box held against his chest. And beyond his mother, very quietly, so that only the front row could have heard, Alexander sang it too, every word, in his careful English, because it was the one English hymn he had been made to learn by heart, at seven, for a wedding in Stockholm, and he had never forgotten it.

Frederick did not sing it.

He held the hymn sheet and looked at the words, and did not sing, and he knew why, and it was not his mouth this time. It was the first line. It was a vow. The oaths a sovereign takes on his accession were waiting for him in a folder in his mother’s study until the second of May, and he would take them then, himself, in his own voice, with his own hand on the book, and he found, standing on the crest in his father’s coat with three thousand people singing I vow to thee round him, that he did not want to say a vow to anybody before he could mean it in the way it would have to be meant, and that the first time he said those words, or any like them, he wanted it to be the time that counted. So he stood, and let the crest sing it for him, and heard every word.

And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago, Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know.

At the end of the second verse his mother’s gloved hand found his, at his side, under the hymn sheet, where nobody could see, and held it for one line, and let go.

The last hymn was In Flanders Fields.

Everybody on the crest knew it by heart, and the whole crest sang it, the seats and the grass and the people standing among the graves below, and it went out over the cemetery and across the river, and he thought that they could probably hear it on the sixth floor of New Westminster General, where a nurse had put a radio on the tray table at half past ten, and a man in a grey cardigan was sitting in a chair by the window, listening.

The hymn ended.

The band stopped. Somewhere below the crest a gun fired, once, a long way off, a flat heavy sound that came up the hill a moment after it happened, and then it was eleven o’clock, and nobody moved.

---

It was longer than in the lab.

It was the same two minutes, and much longer. On the crest there was nothing. There was the wind. There was the sound of three thousand people breathing and not moving, which was not a sound at all, which was the opposite of one. There was the sentry, who had stopped on the mat, facing the Tomb, his rifle at his shoulder, and stood, and did not move, so that for the first time all morning the only thing on the crest that was moving was the flag above the amphitheatre, at half mast, lifting and falling, and the breath of the people going up white.

He looked at the crack in the lid.

He thought about the man under it, who might be anybody. Who might be Black, the papers had said in 1921, and the War Office had never denied it. Who was an American and nothing narrower. Who had been brought home for all those who were not. He thought about June’s great-grandfather, who drove a truck, on page four hundred and something, and Felix saying somebody in the pipe saying they’re there. He thought about his father in a chair by a window listening to nothing on a radio on a tray table. And then he did not think about anything at all, and looked at the crack, and it was enough.

The gun fired again.

The silence ended. It ended the way it always did, all at once and not at all, three thousand people breathing out together and then not moving anyway, for a moment, as though they had not been told.

---

The veteran was a woman.

Nobody knew who it would be until the morning. The Legion chose, and told nobody, and the person chosen came up from the grass at the end of the silence and stood at the foot of the steps, and was the only person who spoke at the Tomb all day who was not reading the service. Nobody with an office ever did. Ellen Mayhew of Chillicothe had read the three lines in 1921 and sat down, and every year since, one voice.

This year it was a small old woman in a dark blue coat and a beret with a badge on it, who walked up from the grass on a stick, slowly, with a younger woman beside her who did not help her and was ready to, and stood at the foot of the steps, and put both hands on the top of the stick, and looked out at three thousand people without any expression at all.

“My name is Dorothy Calloway,” she said. Her voice was thin and dry and carried. “I was a nurse in Indochina. I was twenty-two. I am eighty-four.”

She stopped. The wind took her coat and she let it.

“I held a great many boys’ hands,” said Dorothy Calloway. “I don’t remember all their names. I am sorry for that. I remember some of their faces. I remember that all of them asked for their mothers, and that I said yes, and that I was not their mother, and that it did not seem to matter.” She looked at the Tomb. “This one didn’t have anybody to hold his hand. Nobody knows who he is. So we all do. That’s what this is. That’s all it is.” She looked back at the crowd. “Thank you for holding it.”

She turned round, on the stick, and went back down to the grass, slowly, with the younger woman beside her, not helping, ready to, and nobody clapped, because nobody ever clapped on the Eleventh, and the silence after her was nearly as long as the two minutes.

---

Then the wreaths.

The Crown’s was first. It always was. A sergeant of the Regiment, in the red coat and the spiked helmet, a big man with a grey moustache, came down the aisle of the amphitheatre carrying it, a great ring of dark laurel with a single band of red, and stopped at the end of the front row, and stood there, and waited.

His mother did not look at him. She put her hand on his arm, once, very lightly, through the big coat, and took it away.

He stood up.

He went down the steps of the amphitheatre to the grass, and along the front of it to the chain, with the sergeant beside him carrying the wreath, and Theo two paces behind and one to the left, empty-handed now, because the box was on his seat; Frederick could hear his feet, in step. At the chain the sergeant stopped and turned and held out the wreath, and Frederick took it. It was heavier than it looked. He held it in front of him in both hands, by the frame, the way he had been shown on Thursday in the dark.

Theo stopped at the chain. Frederick heard him stop. He did not look back.

The sentry had stopped on the mat, and turned, and brought his rifle up, and stood.

Twenty paces.

He walked them alone. He walked them on the paving to one side of the mat, the way he had been shown, at the pace he had been shown, not slow and not fast, the pace you would walk to somebody’s door. He looked at the crack in the lid, the whole way. It was the only thing he looked at. He did not look at the sentry, or the Book open on the lid, or the three lines, or the three thousand people behind him, or the flag. He looked at a thin grey line in white marble that nobody had mended, because mending it would have been replacing it, and walked towards it, and at the foot of the steps he stopped.

He bent, and laid the Crown’s wreath on the stone at the foot of the Tomb, against the bottom step, where his father had laid it in 2021, and his grandfather in 1958, and his great-grandfather in 1921 after walking four miles behind a caisson, and straightened up.

He stood.

He did not say anything. Nobody had needed to tell him. No King had spoken here, not the one who walked behind the caisson and wrote eleven words in his own hand, not the one who crossed in 1958, not his father, and he understood, standing at the foot of the steps with the cold coming up through his school shoes from the stone, that it was not a rule about Kings. It was the only place in the Realm where a King had nothing to say worth more than not saying it. And he thought that his father, who had lost most of his words and kept the ones he had for what mattered, would have been the best of all of them at it.

He bowed his head.

He counted, the way he had been shown, to seven, and lifted it, and turned, and walked the twenty paces back, alone, to the chain, where Theo was standing two paces from it and one to the left, with his knees not locked, looking at the back of his head. It was not until he was nearly at the chain that he saw Theo’s face, and that Theo’s face was wet, and that Theo was not doing anything about it, and was looking at him, at the back of his head, steadily, the way Lukas had said, and not laughing.

---

He watched the rest from the front row.

The Prime Minister was next, a large young man in a dark coat, alone, carrying the Ministry’s wreath to the chain and the twenty paces, with his head down, and laying it, and standing, and coming back, and not looking at anybody, and sitting down again at the end of the second row as though he had done nothing at all. Then the Leader of the Opposition, an older man with a limp. Then the services, the Army and the Navy and the Air Force, one officer each, in turn, with the twenty paces each, alone.

Then the schools.

Theo stood up at the end of the front row. He picked the pizza-oven box up off his seat and opened it, and took the tissue paper off the top, carefully, and gave the tissue paper to Lukas, who took it and held it on his lap as though it were the most important thing he had ever been given, and Theo lifted the wreath out of the box with both hands, and held it up, and there was a sound in the amphitheatre that Frederick had never heard on the Eleventh: not a word, not anything, only a kind of breath, three thousand people seeing at once a ring of evergreen covered so thickly with paper poppies that you could not see the green, each one cut out by hand, some perfect, some lopsided, one with five petals, one almost orange, one the size of a coin.

Theo walked to the chain.

He walked alone. He had nobody two paces behind him. He went down the steps of the amphitheatre and along the front of it to the chain with the schools’ wreath held out in front of him in both hands, and at the chain nobody gave him anything, because he already had it, and he stopped, and the sentry turned and brought his rifle up for him, the same as for the King, exactly the same, and Theo walked the twenty paces.

He did not look at the crack. Frederick could see that he did not. He looked at the back of the sentry’s head, the whole way, the way he had said he would in the car, because there was nobody else’s. His knees were not locked. His step was not quite even; it went a little faster in the middle and then he heard it and slowed down. At the foot of the steps he stopped, and bent, and laid the schools’ wreath beside the Crown’s, against the bottom step, a little to the right, so that they were side by side, the dark laurel and the paper poppies, the oldest wreath and the newest, and straightened, and stood, and bowed his head, and Frederick counted with him, in the front row, under his breath, to seven, and Theo lifted his head on seven exactly, and turned, and walked back.

He had been nobody’s job. A bus driver’s son from the north side of Milwaukee who had sat next to somebody because of an alphabet. He came back to the end of the front row and sat down and put his hands between his knees and looked at the ground, and Lukas handed him back the tissue paper without a word, and he folded it, very small, and put it in his pocket. Lukas looked at him for a moment. “You did it,” said Lukas. “The back of the head. I have never managed it.” And Theo looked at the ground, and did not answer, and went red to the ears.

---

Then the polities, the premiers in a long line. Then the High Commissioners of the sister realms, together. Then, last, the wreath of a bereaved family, chosen by the Legion: a young woman with a little boy and a smaller girl, who walked the twenty paces holding hands, the little girl carrying the wreath, which was nearly as big as she was, and dropping it once, and picking it up, and nobody helping her, because it was hers.

And at the end, the third line.

Everybody knew it. Every person on the crest and on the grass and among the graves below, every child who had ever been to school in the Realm, knew the third line, because it was said at the end of every service on the Eleventh in every town in the country, and had been since 1921, and it was the only line of the three that a King had written.

The priest said, Let us say together.

And the crest said it.

Brought home for all those who were not.

Three thousand voices, low, ragged at the edges, rolling out over the grass and down the slope between the white stones towards the river, the way the forecourt had rolled God save the King away down the avenue into the dark. Beside him his mother said it, quietly. Beyond her Alexander said it, in his careful English, a little early, as though he had learned it from a book. At the end of the row Theo said it, loudly, badly, a little late.

Frederick did not say it aloud.

He said it in his head, with his mouth shut, looking at the crack in the lid, because no King had ever spoken at the Tomb, and because the line was the King’s already, it had been the King’s since 1921, eleven words in his own hand with no covering letter, and he did not need to say it to mean it, the way his father did not need to say the trains to hear them.

Brought home for all those who were not.

The crest was quiet. The sentry turned on the mat and began to walk again. Twenty-one paces. A turn. Twenty-one seconds facing the Tomb. The flag went up the pole to the top, slowly, and stopped, and lifted in the wind, and it was over.

---

They walked down the path together, after, between the red coats, which had turned their rifles the right way up, and the white rows going away on both sides, and the people on the grass breaking up and going home. His mother walked ahead with her officer and Alexander’s. Theo and Lukas walked behind, together, two paces back and one to the left, both of them, as though they had rehearsed it, which they had not.

Alexander walked beside him.

They did not say anything for a while. It was the first time they had walked anywhere side by side since they were seven, at a wedding in Stockholm, when they had both been taken out.

“You found your clock,” said Alexander, at last, looking at the path.

“It’s a crack,” said Frederick. “In the lid. Nobody’s mended it, because mending it would be replacing it.”

Alexander thought about that, the whole length of a row of graves.

“That’s a better clock than mine,” he said. “Mine was only a clock.”

Behind them Theo said something to Lukas, low, in his flat Milwaukee English, and Lukas said something back, and then Theo said, quite loudly, the way Theo said things when he had decided them:

“You’re coming to the flat. Tonight. Both of you. It’s the rule. If you’re ever in New Westminster, you come to the flat, and you eat what’s on the table. Everybody does.”

There was a pause on the path.

Lukas looked at the back of Alexander’s head. Alexander looked at Frederick.

“Is that true?” said Alexander. “About the table?”

“It’s the only rule in the Realm that nobody’s ever been let off,” said Frederick. “Including the Crown.”

Alexander walked on for a few steps, between the white stones, with his gloved hands behind his back, exactly like his uncle.

“Then we’ll come,” he said.

---

In the car on the way back across the river Theo held the empty box on his knees. He had not let anybody take it. It had PIZZA OVEN printed on the side in red, and THIS WAY UP, and an arrow, and Theo looked at the arrow for a long time.

Castellanos drove. The radio was on, very low, the ABC, and somebody was reading a poem from a church in the city, slowly, in a deep voice, a poem about the word American and who might lie under it, the way they did in the Black churches every year after the silence, and nobody in the car said anything until it ended. After the poem there was the news, and the first thing in it was still Los Angeles, the tenth day, the water back on in Pasadena and not yet in San Bernardino, the Russian team going home tomorrow and the Japanese team staying, and Castellanos turned it down a little further, not off.

“Freddie.”

“What?”

“I didn’t faint.”

“No.”

“I nearly did. At the chain. Coming back. When I saw your face.” Theo looked at the arrow. “You looked like your dad. In the photo. The one in the library, from 2021. Doing it. The face.” He was quiet for a moment. “That’s all. I thought you should know. It wasn’t a bad thing.”

Frederick looked out of the window at the river going by, grey, under the bridge, and the Charter Axis on the other side, and the people still on the pavements in their coats, going home now, with their poppies.

“Theo.”

“What?”

“You looked like you,” said Frederick. “Doing yours. The whole way. I counted. You came up on seven.”

Theo did not say anything. He looked at the arrow on the box for a while longer. Then he said, to the arrow, “This way up,” and they both laughed, in the back of the big car with the flag on the wing, the way you laugh when you have been holding your breath for a very long time and somebody has let you stop.